NY Times On Language Gets Weird And Personal

I promise this is on topic, so please bear with me. . . . One day, as a cure for a broken heart, a heart that had only barely survived a head-on collision with another heart, a heart just out of intensive care, bruised and limping and still shying at the sound of any traffic, I decided to go online to find distraction in the arms of other, virtual men and maybe, as a bonus, a suitable replacement for the one no longer in my life, to meet someone the normal way, as opposed to the archaic, anachronistic, so 1970s way I had met HIM — I’d had my skis (nearly) charmed off me at 10,000 feet by my instructor, who was trying, with a dribble of luck but gallons of patience, to teach me how to jump turn on telemark skis. A broken heart, like the crack of dawn, can’t be fixed, said a wise friend, but I was hoping that the splint of male attention might at least encourage healing — and it would mean I’d have less time to waste obsessing over you-know-whom.

Tango’s Take The Dish has been known to read William Safire’s On Language from time to time. We were surprised to have a new author this weekend. And we were surprised to see that the article was Jaimie Esptein’s (first and last names that we have never seen before) treatise on why she was single. Because she loves words. Or more accurately can’t shush, shush, shush the part of her brain that insists on correcting people. There has got to another logophile out there for her. By the end of her diatribe she assures us, gentle readers,that she’ll be all right. She may have lowered her standards but she’ll never lose her perspicacity. Hopefully she’ll find the onomatopoeticist that makes her heart go vroom.